Tomorrow, the Argentine moviemaker Maximiliano Schonfeld will formally open the video installation Sombra Grande / Big Shadow on Tabakalera’s first floor. The work takes its inspiration from the universe of his feature-length film of the same name, to have its world premiere in the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section at the San Sebastian Festival’s 72nd edition.   

Schonfeld’s movie is a non-fiction based on the rediscovery of a native language, Chaná, believed lost until recently and only spoken by one person in Argentina: Blas Jaime. In only a short time dictionaries were published and the language was completely recovered. That man situated the Chaná people in the same place where the descendants of the Volga Germans, in the Entre Ríos province, are today inexorably losing their dialect.

That tension between two cultures coexisting in the same space provides the material for both the film and the video installation, dominated by the presence of Blas Jaime who, from the big centre screen, converses with the actors portraying the Chanás in the film. These people appear dotted over the space on several television screens emanating an expression, a rhythm and a soundscape that recreate a Chaná settlement from the scarce existing historical descriptions.

“The installation seeks to recreate sonically, for the first time, a hypothetical Chaná settlement in the province of Entre Ríos before the arrival of Sebastián Gaboto, sailor, cartographer and explorer of the 16th century. To do so, we turned to the few people who learned to speak this recovered language and we worked on the fauna of that time,” explains Schonfeld.

In the filmmaker's opinion, “a recovered language is a new way of seeing the world and understanding the singularities of the identity of the Argentine coast.” “In addition, it allows us to work in tension with a territory in constant symbolic dispute, between Germanic immigrants who arrived when everything was forest and the native peoples had been displaced to Jesuit strongholds or directly exterminated,” he adds.

Organised by the San Sebastian Festival and Tabakalera, the video installation will be open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 20:00, except on Thursday 26th, when it will close its doors one hour earlier at 19:00.

The video installation acts as a complement to the film Sombra grande / Big Shadow, to have its world premiere on Thursday 26th at 19:00 in the Tabakalera cinema, with participation of its director and crew. The Trueba cinema will programme another two showings on its screen 2 on Friday 27th at 16:00 and 20:00, while the last screening on Saturday 28th will run in the same cinema at 18:15.

Bio-Filmography

Maximiliano Schonfeld (Crespo, Argentina. 1982) studied film at the ENERC. His first film, Germania (2012), won the Special Jury Prize at the BAFICI 2013 and the Best Debut Feature Award at Hamburg Festival. La helada negra (2015), his second film, screened in the Panorama section of the Berlin Festival. His first documentary, La siesta del tigre (2016), premiered in the International Competion at DocLisboa 2016. His following project, Jesús López, participated in Proyecta 2018 and WIP Latam 2020 at the San Sebastian Festival and opened Horizontes Latinos in 2021. In 2022 he was one of the residents of the Ikusmira Berriak programme with his project Frankenstein and he directed a new documentary, Luminum, which competed at the Mar del Plata and IndieLisboa festivals. Sombra grande / Big Shadow was selected for WIP Latam 2023 in San Sebastian, where it will have its world premiere, this year.